PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Combine youthful optimism with the conviction that even the most intractable problems can be solved, then throw in a sterling education that includes medical school, and you begin to...

G. Wayne Miller Journal Staff Writer gwaynemiller

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Combine youthful optimism with the conviction that even the most intractable problems can be solved, then throw in a sterling education that includes medical school, and you begin to have an understanding of congressional candidate Stan Tran.

Tran, 26, has never run for political office — but now he is seeking the Republican nomination for the 1st District seat held by Democrat David Cicilline. Tran faces Newport’s Cormick B. Lynch, a former Marine and Iraq veteran, in the Sept. 9 primary.

America’s imperfect health-care system ranks high on the list of issues emphasized by Tran, a Stanford University graduate who is taking a leave from his studies at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School to conduct his campaign.

He had no interest in politics, he said, until he began his medical studies.

“I realized that people are getting sick because they don’t have access, because they’re poor,” he said. He gave the example of patients with diabetes or hypertension who do not improve because they do not take their medications as prescribed.

“One of the reasons why is that it’s so expensive and they can’t afford it. And they’re often too ashamed to tell their doctors. So they cut their pills in half or take them every other day. That’s nothing I can fix as a doctor.”

As a public official, he could play a role in a fix.

Tran’s campaign is long on odds and short on cash. As of the first of this week, he had loaned himself $5,000 and raised “just a bit over $5,000” more, he said. As of March 31, Cicilline had nearly $486,000 in his campaign account.

Still, Tran believes he will prevail in his primary and perhaps even beat Cicilline.

“I think I have a shot,” he said.

This is where the optimism and conviction come in.

Even if he does not make it to Congress, Tran said, he will be satisfied with the platform his candidacy has given him to discuss U.S. health care — a topic he knows from the inside out, and not just from the clinical perspective, but also as a matter of public policy. In his capacity as president of the Brown chapter of the American Medical Association’s student organization, Tran became deeply involved in discussions of affordability and access to care.

“As a country, we pay the most for health care and have the worst outcomes,” he said. “There’s huge room for improvement. We can definitely cut costs and improve benefits.”

Tran said he lost his fight to get the AMA student organization to affirm that socioeconomic factors have a direct impact on a person’s health.

“More important than anything else is how much money you have,” he said. “It’s so obvious to anyone in medicine that that’s true. And it’s so obvious to anyone who’s educated that if you’re poor, you get screwed in life.”

The socioeconomic resolution he proposed failed to pass. “It was just too crazy. I was like ‘all right. I’m going to have to step outside of medicine.’”

Acknowledging that in certain respects “I don’t sound like a Republican,” Tran said he affiliated with the party because “my goal is to get the cost of health care down,” and the GOP label would allow him to be “most effective in that regard.”

He said he does not believe that repealing the Affordable Care Act, popularly called Obamacare, would be the best solution, but neither is Obamacare itself, he asserted.

Tran has ideas he says will work. They include establishing a universal standard for keeping and sharing electronic medical records; allowing Americans to buy medications from anywhere in the world; permitting Medicare administrators to negotiate prices of drugs with pharmaceutical firms, something they are prohibited from doing now; and requiring hospitals to publish the prices they charge for procedures.

“These are things that people push very hard against,” he said. “I like to think I’m a critical thinker and I often don’t follow rules that don’t make sense.”

The son of South Vietnamese immigrants who eventually settled in California, Tran was born and raised in that state. Medicine began to interest him at Stanford, where many of his friends studied the life sciences. After teaching high school science for a year in a remote section of Arizona, he enrolled in the Alpert Medical School’s 2015 class.

He plans to specialize in family medicine as opposed to, say, neurosurgery, where the income potential would be much greater.

“With family medicine,” he said, “you’re in touch with the needs of all kinds of populations.”

Should he be elected, Tran says, he would be self-term-limited: three terms or six years at most, the time he said Brown would grant him a leave before disenrolling him.

Other issues Tran emphasizes in his campaign include economic development, which he would bolster by increasing the number of skilled workers, among other measures; education, including merit-based hiring of teachers and year-round school for kindergarten through eighth grade; measures to better protect women from violence; and addressing what he calls a “broken” criminal justice system.

Whether he goes to Congress or soon back to medical school, Tran said personal power and wealth do not motivate him.

“I’m very happy with who I am, with how much money I have,” he said. “I mean, my budget is like $20,000 a year. So working at the minimum wage I could support my lifestyle and I’d be happy with that.”

As if to underscore the point, Tran arrived for his interview with The Journal wearing shorts and a T-shirt and riding a bicycle.

So what does motivate him?

“I want to change things,” he said. “I want to challenge the system. I want to fix things.”

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